Tumbleweed Whenever you think of the Wild West of America, you think of cowboy movies and tumbleweed, perpetually tumbling around a desolate landscape.
Salt lowers the freezing/melting point of water, so in both cases the idea is to take advantage of the lower melting point. Ice forms when theÂ­ temperature of water reaches 32 degrees Fahrenheit (0 degrees Celsius). When you add salt, that temperature drops: A 10-percent salt solution freezes at 20 F (-6 C), and a 20-percent solution freezes at 2 F (-16 C). On a roadway, this means that if you sprinkle salt on the ice, you can melt it. The salt dissolves into the liquid water in the ice and lowers its freezing point.
Confidence votes 26.1K. The freezing point of salt water varies depending on how much salt is in the water. For example, water that is 3500 parts per million salt (avg. amount in seawater) will freeze around -2 degrees Celsius (28 degrees F). Water with an extreme amount of salt in it, like in some lake waters in Death Valley CA, with 300,000 ppm, will freeze at -20 to -30 degrees C (-4 to -20 degrees F). Fahrenheit (Â°F) is a unit of temperature named for the German physicist Gabriel Fahrenheit (1686 - 1736).